Because I can't render italics in my comments:
Dear Mental Multi-vitamin,
Thank you for setting me straight on a few items and for prompting further inquiry.
You are right. The contemptuous tone of the entry about those “dreadful mommy blogs” is not uncharacteristic & does fall in line with your site’s basic “un-blog” tenet. It merely seemed uncharacteristic to me because I started sporadically visiting M-Mv only about six months ago and had you classified as one of those blogs that contain more links & references than original writing. M-mv was filed mentally as a good place to go if reading inspiration around here ever dried up (but it never does; reading always begets reading and if the geneological line of inquiry dies out, I pop by the library and spawn new ones.) So, with a balanced intellectual diet already, there wasn’t a great need to pop a multi.
Yet, because I thought, excitedly: “There’s a nighstand that looks like mine!”, I would visit every now and then out of solidarity. That is all I knew. I poked around your archives yesterday to find a little more about what you were about. It seems as if you had time to write more in the old days or simply had more to say as you launched the site. That is understandable.
Do I still feel solidarity?
Yes.
In blogging, as in life, we all have our own particular scratches that itch--certain themes that register more sensitively on our radars than others. Lately, as I question my upbringing and the world into which I was born, mine has been the great dismay I feel whenever I encounter scorn and disdain for moms and homemakers. I feel a prickle of hurt when it comes from sources I myself admire, that playground sense of “Ah, I like them, but they wouldn’t like me.” Or the feistier, “Goddammit. I have the mental acuity to understand him, but he doesn’t have the imagination to understand me.” (This in reference to something I was reading by James Hillman the other day.)
Now I understand you were not denigrating these domestic roles, but rather decrying the immature whining about roles that in your personal experience have Not.Been.That. Hard. Fair enough. Of course, too, you have the right to make qualitative distinctions based on your preferences and the right to express them. Quality seems to have become an evil word. If one makes distinctions between people on the grounds of their taste, manners, culture, or blogs and if the distinctions convey any suggestion that one is more commendable than another instead of just different, one is bound to offend, to come across as snobbish and to risk alienating people. You carry on in the face of this knowledge with the courage of your convictions.
Convictions can change. You welcome growth. So, let me leave you with two small thoughts for further consideration:
1. Last night as I read your blog, I saw that you heartily concurred with the fellow who wrote that “delight in excellence is often confused with snobbery.” True. But even more often, I would say, that disdain for the commonplace is snobbery and you would better serve your own image (if this is important to you) if you rose above it. Continue to delight in excellence, as you do so well. Yes, people who whine about the choices they’ve made are irksome and blogs are a fine place to whine about whining, but those “dreadful mommy blogs” really aren’t hurting anyone and you don’t have to read them (mine included.) Moreover, the women who write them are at least engaged in creative acts of their own conception instead of sitting in front of the television all day and they may well be on their own path to growth, unlikely as it may seem. (Would I rush to the whiny woman on the playground? Yes! For I would want to understand the historical and cultural sources of her dissatisfactions, though I’d probably just nod in sympathy at the time.)
2. You at M-Mv write so very well. Your mantra of reading, thinking, learning is essentially fine. Just know that if you were to delve more into personal revelations of what it is that you end up thinking and learning, I wouldn't click away. Furthermore, I don’t think you’d be betraying the nature of what you set out to do. But I understand there are only so many hours in a day and you state your priorities well—that publically synthesizing what you’ve learned isn’t as important as the learning itself.
10:47:13 AM 
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